Forbidden Kiss by Shannon Leigh Page A

room.
    On Thursday she would either be gone from Verona to her true love, or dead.
    ...
    Impossible. Unless Jule believed in reincarnation and new age baloney, which she didn’t. She believed in science and facts. The concrete. The physical.
    One thing Pio said in particular left her raw and bruised inside. That they were meant to be together. He was simply setting them on the right path. As it always had been and would always be.
    She didn’t for an instant believe she belonged with Pio. Now or anytime, past, present, or future. But she couldn’t shake the feeling he’d spoken those words to her many times before.
    …
    Rom at last pushed through the gated cloisters of the crumbling monastery and into the tunnel descending to the bed of death . The quiet seemed loud and too obvious after the happy celebrations of the day.
    The time and my intents are savage-wild,
    more fierce and inexorable far
    than empty tigers or the roaring sea.
    His hand gripped the railing, steadying his course, his resolve. No hiding. No turning back. One foot in front of the other. As it had always been.
    He kept moving further down, refusing to acknowledge the shortness of breath in his lungs.
    Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,
    Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,
    Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,
    And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food.
    The tomb opened up before him, two electric torches illuminating the domed room. The present fell away and the past rushed up to greet him with a cold embrace.
    ...
    He laid Paris to rest inside the tomb’s entrance, careful of the man ’s head as it met the bricked floor. Though his heart raced until Romeo thought it would burst from his chest, he didn’t hurry, but gave Juliet’s would-be suitor and his own cousin the respect he deserved.
    Too late. Romeo had arrived too late and more people had died and would still. His life, his mere breath, marked each living soul he encountered. No one was safe from Romeo.
    Free of Paris’s weight, Romeo stood and slowly crossed the tomb, his footsteps echoing in the small chamber. He stood next to his prone wife, drinking in the sight of her. With his arms hanging heavy at his sides and his fingers curled into fists, he simply stared. Noting each detail.
    Her beauty defied even death. Color bloomed yet in her cheeks and lips, a rosy red that spoke of life rather than death. But he couldn’t discern breath in her chest or on her lips.
    If death had truly claimed her, then so shall it take him. But first he would look his fill.
    “I’ll stay with thee, Juliet. Never leaving you again, guarding you against the dark.” He palmed her hand, slipping his fingers under hers until they were tightly joined.
    “Here with you I’ll die, throwing off the unhappy circumstances of our lives. I ’m tired, Juliet. So very tired.”
    Slipping his hand free, Romeo crawled up on the dais and lifted Juliet until she rested limply in his lap. He pulled the apothecary’s potion from the pouch at his side and raised it to his lips.
    “Here’s to you, my love,” he said, drinking the liquid and throwing the empty bottle away.
    With poison still wet on his lips, Romeo kissed Juliet before he felt the world tip to the left and slip away into blackness.
    ...
    When next he woke, Romeo lay in a monk’s cell, his body and destiny forever altered by Lawrence’s alchemy.
    But now, here, in the twenty-first century, little from that fateful night remained. The dais was gone, replaced by a period sarcophagus, which Rom prayed rested empty and not filled with some unknown bones.
    Paris’s remains, too, were gone, as was Tybalt’s bloody, sheet wrapped body.
    Juliet wasn’t here. Her spirit didn’t linger.
    Rom released a low, long breath and bent over, grasping his knees. He was lost to discover Juliet was truly, irrevocably gone.

Chapter Eleven
    Jule took her first breath of Veronese air. Funny. It smelled the same as the air in Chicago.
    “Ms.